Today in Digital Marketing - Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals’ Flip-Flop

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

A final answer — perhaps — on the age-old question: How much does user experience matter to your Google ranking? Meta adds some new tricks to its ad campaigns. TikTok now offers more performance data, even from opted-out users, and Instagram is working on a very meme-worthy update.📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact usLinks to all of today’s stories hereListen to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. “Future You” will thank you. GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Already Premium? Update Credit Card • CancelMORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital📞 Need marketing advice? Leave us a voicemail and we’ll get an expert to help you free!🤝 Our Slack⭐ Review usUPGRADE YOUR SKILLSInside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin GalesGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and CoursesSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Wednesday, March 13th. Today, a final answer, perhaps, on the age-old question, how much does user experience matter to your Google ranking? Also, Meta adds some new tricks to its ad campaigns. TikTok now offers more performance data, even from opted-out users. And Instagram is working on a very meme-worthy update. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, Today Digital Marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack,

fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Google hasn't always been the most clear when it comes to telling us what specifically matters when it comes to search engine ranking. And perhaps for good reason.

Make it too detailed and the spammers will exploit it. And while they do share the guidelines documents they give to their human reviewers, those people's job is to help give feedback to the algorithm, not to turn up or down specific results. As a result, Google has played somewhat coy with the things we marketers can control about our web pages. One example, whether the core web vitals affect your brand's website ranking and search or not. The core web vitals are a set of web measurements that track how good the overall user experience is. Does it load fast? Can people interact with it quickly? Does the layout jump around too much? That sort of thing. But when asked directly whether improving your Core Web Vitals score will improve your rankings,

Google reps have usually blanketed their responses with vague distinctions like it might improve the system, but not the ranking, the signals, but not the results, and so on. Even as recently as last month, and as we covered back then, Google said, quote, we don't confirm any of the things, page experience or core web vitals, as a direct ranking factor, unquote. But now, they've come a little closer to confirm what I think most marketers and SEO professionals have assumed all along. Core web vitals do affect the ranking of individual pages. Google this week updated its search documentation to read, quote,

What aspects of page experience are used in ranking? Core web vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend site owners achieve good core web vitals for success with search and to ensure greater user experience generally. Beyond core web vitals, other page experience aspects don't directly help your website rank higher in search results. However, they can make your website more satisfying to use, which is generally aligned with what our ranking systems seek to reward, unquote. This section replaces one which was a little more

wishy-washy. The previous version of this read, What aspects of page experience are used in rankings? There are many aspects to page experience, including some listed on this page. While not all aspects may be directly used to inform ranking, they do generally align with success in search ranking and are worth attention. So yeah, the previous version was clear as mud, as they say. Google search analyst John Mueller went a little further

on LinkedIn. Quote, yes, Google search does use core web vitals for search. However, it's not worth over-focusing on tweaking the scores just for SEO. I know it's rare that you can measure something more or less objectively for SEO, but don't let it get to your head. You don't need to obsess over each fractional point there. A perfect score is a fun technical challenge, and you'll learn something along the way. I know the feeling. I worked on mine too, but it's not going to make your site rankings jump up, unquote. On a bit of a funny side note, the SEO community noticed this week that John Mueller's own website has apparently been delisted from the Google search index. Mueller hasn't said what's going on, if he even knows, but has responded to some of these reports with memes and one-liners.

Meta this week updated its Advantage Plus and shopping campaigns. Here's what's new. Automatic optimizations will crop video ads to fit Reels or the mobile Facebook and Instagram apps with a 9 by 16 aspect ratio. This is under the Advantage Plus umbrella, meaning it might kick in automatically. Advantage Plus catalog ads can now include branded videos or customer demonstrations instead of static images. And all global advertisers can now use dynamic and personalized videos. Hero images in catalog ads are in place now, letting you upload a main image to the center of your Advantage Plus catalog ads. Meta will then dynamically show people the best products from their catalog to drive performance.

Reminder ads can now incorporate external links to new products or sales, which might help convert interest into purchases. Also this summer, Meta will give us the option to notify users when an event begins, and before it ends, Meta also plans to extend reminder ads to Reels. Meta is also globally introducing alphanumeric promo codes in Facebook and Instagram ads. According to the company, advertisers who used this

in the testing phase saw about a 9% drop in cost per purchase and about a 10% increase in conversions. As always, take these numbers with a grain of salt because Meta doesn't usually

report study results that aren't positive. And later this month, Meta will introduce ads with product tags to the Facebook feed. Currently, they're only available on Instagram. Next month, they'll roll out ads with product tags for all businesses globally, even if they don't have a shop. And finally, there is a collaborative ads update with more insights into performance. And Meta says it's testing letting advertisers use collaborative ads update with more insights into performance. And Meta says it's testing letting advertisers use collaborative ads

in conjunction with Advantage Plus shopping campaigns. TikTok has added an updated SK Ad Network framework into TikTok's ads manager. This is a somewhat technical thing, but essentially provides better measurement of campaigns, despite the privacy limitations set on Apple devices. The framework groups privacy thresholds into four tiers, each tier having a different level of operating detail that shows up on TikTok's ads platform. It will give advertisers longer attribution windows. They can be two, seven, or 35 days, and some better reporting like real-time data and estimated lifetime value.

Quoting social media today, SK Ad Network enables anonymized performance tracking built into Apple's app network, so you can still gather campaign performance feedback from the system, even with users switching off full tracking. It's not the same level of insight that you had previously, but it's better than nothing and will better inform your overall campaign approach. And it can improve performance. TikTok says adopting S-Can 4.0 on TikTok has resulted in lower cost per acquisition and higher conversion rates for many partners, unquote. Also, briefly, while we're here, American House

legislators yesterday passed a bipartisan bill to ban TikTok from the U.S. unless its Chinese owners sell it to an American group. The vote was not unanimous, and it now heads to the U.S. Senate, where experts say it might receive a bumpier ride. News publishers across the web say Google's new search generative experience could cut their organic traffic by more than half. Search generative experience is Google's insertion of AI into the search results. It's somewhat similar to the zero-click strategy they adopted years ago,

where Google would try to answer a question at the top of the page of search results instead of just providing a list of links that might have the answer in them. That was great for users, but it meant they didn't have to click to a website to find the answer, and fewer clicks means fewer visits, means worse numbers to show advertisers interested in running campaigns on those sites. Or for merchants, fewer opportunities to get people on their site to cookie them or sell them something. SGE uses AI to try to come up with a more detailed answer to the query. Search for baby shower ideas and Google's SGE will give you a list of ideas up higher in the results page than blog posts and ads, which are trying to optimize for that result. One report in Adweek today quotes an executive at Raptive, which manages ad sales for web publishers, as saying SGE could translate to an annual ad revenue loss of up to $2 billion across the industry.

Travel and family sites expected to be the hardest hit. Quoting that Adweek piece, quote, an analysis found an 18 to 64% traffic drop across 23 technology websites. Publishers are exploring various responses, from licensing content to AI firms like OpenAI, to suing for the unauthorized use of their material. Others, like Money.com, are tweaking their websites to better fit SGE's format, hoping to capture more traffic. The shift to SGE also raises questions about the future of ad placement and revenue. With SGE pushing ads to the bottom of responses, the traditional top spot ads may see less

engagement, potentially affecting Google's bottom line and, by extension, the visibility of SGE results for certain queries, unquote. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Instagram is testing a new Reels feature called Spins, which could juice your brand account's engagement. So far, from reverse engineering, it seems like users would be able to remix your Reels posts with alternate audio or text blocks. If this sounds familiar, it might be because this is somewhat similar to those meme creator web apps that let you overlay bold text, usually in the impact font, over someone else's image. Of course, this extends to your social media team, too.

They could slap new audio or text on a post that's going viral to try to get in on the attention. Again, this appears to only be in testing for now. Also apparently being worked on, the ability to send files in direct messages. This isn't a big surprise. Meta has for a couple of years now said they want to merge Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp messaging into a single platform. No word on when either of these would launch. Google apparently wants to be MailChimp. Today, the company said they're launching an email campaign builder right inside the Gmail version that they sell to organizations.

Quoting the announcement, quote, Google Workplace Editions can now create customized email layouts using a new email layout editor that is accessible from the compose screen in Gmail or Google Drive. In the layout editor, you can create a new email layout from scratch or select from a predefined set of email templates, which include images, text elements, and buttons. You can then customize these templates by placing elements such as color schemes, logos, images, footer text, links, wherever you'd like. You can also share a layout file directly from the email layout editor using the share button, unquote.

It is a pretty simple builder. We have an image of it in today's email newsletter. If you've seen the UI of Google Sites, you will recognize it. To be honest, I don't know I've heard of a single instance of a brand sending mass emails from a corporate Gmail account. I don't know, maybe Google has a way

of detecting the good ones from the bad, but that sounds like a path straight to spam. Plus, this lacks the one thing marketers really care about, performance metrics. Either way, though, once it launches, you'll be able to access custom email layouts in Gmail from the layout icon in your composed toolbar. This will start to roll out in a couple of weeks and should be to most corporate plans by the end of next month. On the show tomorrow, if a TikTok ban actually goes through, what would be the real world effect on marketers and their ad campaigns? We will have expert analysis on the show tomorrow. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you then.